Some free time this week to get the house tidied up a bit, which will massively improve my mood.
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So I’ve been without power since the 27th. Hold on, there’s a downer at the start, but it’s ending on a high note. Currently typing this from my sister’s apartment; our house still doesn’t have its utilities restored.
The problem with being without power in my current living situation is that everything else fails, too. The well is electric, so I have no running water. The refrigerator is electric, so I have no food preservation. The stove is electric, so I can’t cook anything. Air circulation is electric, and the house arranges air in a really weird way, so on the first day when the winds were still threatening to collapse our roof, we had to keep all the windows closed, and had to figure out which rooms were off-limits for oxygen reasons, because the ceilings tend to hoard it all when the vents aren’t running.
I already had quite a lot of stressors and urgent problems before the power went out, so this normally would have just been infuriating and tedious, but prior matters made this feel like a crisis. My resolve was stretched enough already.
To combat this, I’ve been taking note of when something positive has happened, so here’s my backlog:
- A few months ago, I switched to a phone plan with unlimited data. My cell service out here is tenuous, at best, but it won’t be taken from me, even if it arrives in a spotty trickle.
- I exercise a healthy distrust of Internet connectivity, even during periods where the Internet works well. Because of this, I keep a small collection of my favorite low-resource media on my phone.
- I exercise a healthy distrust of corporations, so I happen to have my favorite book series in physical print.
- There were a pair of surge protectors, which also had power banks. My parents had the foresight to unplug these as soon as possible, and we were able to charge our phones a bit for one night. The banks don’t hold too much, so we have to ration our battery power each day, but every bit counts.
- The house was encased in the darkest dark I had ever experienced in a very long time. Normally, this wouldn’t be too concerning; plenty of people navigate their homes without sight. I’ve trained myself to hear a small amount of echolocation for walls, but this doesn’t work for furniture (yet). The problem is I am still recovering from a severely debilitating diabetic injury, and there are still very serious consequences if I stub my toe, especially while I’m actively job hunting. The major logistical risk of darkness is what made it so infuriating and terrifying. The first night of complete darkness, I started really spiraling. I was already shaking from stress before the power went out. I carefully stumbled through the dark to find a flashlight and went to find one of my partners (the other managed to fall asleep somehow). They were helping my parents recharge electronics from the power banks. I was so deeply overwhelmed from how relieved I felt seeing them, sitting in a little circle of lantern light, protection against the darkness, that I started crying uncontrollably. Whatever happens, my partners help me feel like I can keep going and find a solution.
- The forum wasn’t easy to connect to, and it drained my battery like crazy during successful connections, so I wasn’t able to log in. Discord was much easier to connect to, and drained my battery quite a bit less, so seeing y’all in the Neo-Int server was absolutely worth the battery meter falling.
- I don’t deal with silence very well, and talking doesn’t help. Finally deciding that spending some battery listening to music was a spiritual experience.
- Board games are fun, even if I keep losing at them.
- Smoked sausage on old crackers is wonderful.
- The stores were all closed during the entire first day, and we were not stocked up on drinking water. I had a very real concern about getting a diabetic infection from dehydration, so I spent that whole first day literally terrified of eating food, because every tiny bit of sugar of any kind will add up when I can’t flush it out with water. The next day, the stores opened back up, and we got water bottles.
- Brushing your teeth does incredible things for morale.
- Woohoo! I can solve a Rubik’s cube in dim light!
- Birds are silly.
- Lizards are also silly.
- I found an inchworm on the porch. It was carrying a hair with its hind legs. I offered it a paper plate to ride on, and brought it to a tall grass stalk. It tested the grass, but the plant couldn’t support the bug’s weight, so it decided to be cautious and remain on the plate. I brought it to some clover, instead, which held up the bug nicely, and was also a convenient snack. As it left the paper plate, it left behind the hair it had been carrying. So… I think that means I was paid with hair to transport an inchworm. I might put that on my resumé.
- Oh, yeah, the roof didn’t collapse, so we got to keep our kitchen!
- Terminal-based IF parsers (through Termux) don’t take a lot of battery to run! Gonna play one of Amanda’s games that I had downloaded!
- I was really worried about some of y’all in my region of the USA, but kind volunteers passed messages between here and Discord to assure me that y’all have survived!! That was a huge relief to hear!
- Ironically, right before the storm hit, I was apparently visibly overworking myself with IF-Octane while scrambling to do job hunting, and my dad suggested I take a break. I said “No”. The winds apparently took my dad’s side on this one.
- What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed is super intriguing so far! The first room is a very excellent starting point, in particular! I’m having fun roaming the place~
- My sister’s apartment got power and water before my home did, and she let me shower at her place!
- My dad lives. There was almost a fatal miscommunication between doctors that would have killed him if he didn’t correct the nurse about a wrong medical history assumption. But he said something!
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Despite the dangers and problems going on right now, it’s really great to find positives! Glad you found so many!
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So excited you’re playing my freshman game! I would do so much differently if I wrote that today.
I feel your literal powerlessness deeply. It’s really scary. We got power back after 2 days, and I understand that we’re in the top 1% with that. We’re very used to long power outages because it happens nearly every winter in rural TX-- we had power out for over a week in 2022. So we are well-stocked in big battery packs, flashlights, batteries, canned beans, and all manner of prepper-ish stuff. The worst thing was the news blackout for those days. No phones, no internet, no roads out. We didn’t now anything beyond our neighborhood. There was ONE radio station out of Asheville where the DJs got stranded in the station by the floodwaters, and that’s how we learned that we would not be going to Asheville for safety, and that we in fact were in far better shape where we were.
I cannot solve a Rubik’s Cube in bright light. Nothing makes me feel quite as stupid as one of those things.
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To be fair, I have never known a person who solved one without researching and practicing algorithms first. If someone told me that they figured it out with no prior knowledge, I wouldn’t believe them lol.
One of those things where I assume mathematicians had a good ponder about it for a while, released some notes, and the community has been running with it since.
The worst thing, honestly, was the messaging around it. I didn’t know that each category of hurricane got its own non-hurricane rank. One of my partners knew this, and their ears would have perked up at “tropical storm”, but they were very preoccupied in the days leading up to it, while me and the other partner had assumed this was just gonna be heavy rain with mild winds. We were not expecting it to be a category 4 hurricane. Had we known that, we would have made proper preparations, because both of my partners survived the category 4 (almost category 5) hurricane that hit Puerto Rico 7 or 8 years ago, while they were still living there.
Genuinely thankful for you. The situation sucks. Hopefully utilities are restored by the end of today, but it keeps getting postponed.
Chance encounters like this are wild. Really glad that worked out for you. 
It’s got a lot of heart, no pun intended! 
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I figured it out, although it took years of on-and-off fiddling with the thing. I can only solve it by layers and not particularly fast: ~2 to 3 minutes. I learned how to solve a single layer on day one and figured out the second layer not long after. Getting the last without messing up the first two is much harder. The hardest part is the final step of getting the bottom corners oriented properly. You have to temporarily mess up the other layers to do it, trusting that everything moves in cycles to bring it back to completion.
I am awed by people who can complete it in less than two minutes.
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Define G to be the group of legal moves of the Rubik’s Cube. Let A = a_1 a_2 … a_n be the sequence of moves used to shuffle the cube, and let A^-1 = a_n^-1 … a_2^-1 a_1^-1 be its inverse. Then A^-1 A = I, solved.
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Okay just because I know how you are, I believe you lol
Okay, sure, this is technically a solution in the same way memorizing how the cube was shuffled is technically a solution lol. 
Ya goober.
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Actually you can solve the Rubik’s cube without a lot of algorithms. I do agree that mathematicians no doubt have an advantage here.
I am not very fast though. But I understand how it works and that is enough for me.
Cool fact: During a Lego Mindstorms competition someone showcased a Rubik’s Cube solver which used the Lego stepper motors and sensors etc to physically solve the cube. It was really slow but it worked!
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We went to a wedding and danced until 3 in the morning.
Now my legs hurt.
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I can’t even tell if a normal Rubik’s cube is solved in bright light. [/blind joke]
I can solve a monochrome Fisher cube if I get lucky. And if you’ve never heard of the Fisher Cube, it’s one of the classic modifications of the Rubik’s cube, first built by and named for Tony Fisher, one of the most famous twisty puzzle builders from the preCAD era. A Fisher Cube is constructed by truncating four parallel edges of a Rubik’s cube to form an octagonal prism than building back up into a cube by extending the uncut lateral faces of the cube. This turns the corner cubies into edges, the 8 edge cubies that are extended into corners, the 4 edges that are truncated into centers and the 4 centers that are extended into corners. Like the Rubik’s cube, a Fisher cube is typically stickered with a different color on each face, but this transformation introduces a decent amount of shapeshifting so even just returning the puzzle to a cubic shape is a decent puzzle.
Also, in twisty puzzle circles, the term “Fisher” is used to describe any puzzle where the mechanism has been rotated relative to the external shape along a face-face axis by half the angle of rotational symmetry(e.g. 45 degrees for a cube, 60 degrees for a octahedron, 36 degrees for a dodecahedron). The term “Axis” is used for a similar transformation along an vertex-vertex axis, and an axis 333 in it’s checkerboard configuration is a spikey mess you would never guess is supposed to be a cube.
I also own a 222 shaped like a Japanese lucky cat idol that I can solve if I get lucky.
Also managed to solve a pyraminx Crystal on my own many years ago, but that was back when I still had a working eye and took me many hours over several days and the only insight I can recall is there being a four fifth-twist algorithm to cycle three edges.
As for a twisty puzzle I can reliably solve even blind, there’s the rainbow nautilus, but that puzzle is so highly bandaged that reaching the deepest part of its state space is hard, so I might have never actually properly scrambled mine. If you’re curious, it consists of 3 layers, the top and bottom being divided into wedges of 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, and 90-degrees and the middle layer divided in half. whenever a cut dividing all three layers in half lines up, you can do a turn exchanging half of the top layer with half of the bottom layer and flipping half of the middle layer and the three layers can spin independently. It’s name comes from the wedges being colored as a 8-color color wheel and the puzzle beiing shaped like a nautilus with the spiral’s raidus increasing with the angular width of the wedges.
And group theory is all over the place in twisty puzzle analysis, though only doctrinaire puzzles are easily treated as groups with bandaged puzzles often breaking groups and jumbling puzzles never being well behaved groups if I’m remembering things correctly(I confess, some of the theoretical discussions on teh Twisty Puzzles Forum go over my head, but then again, I only have a BS in CS, some of the people doing active analysis on the TP Forum have Ph.Ds in Mathematics.
More on topic, a package with two new sets of premium dice arrived today, along with two new dice vaults, and my amethyst set of mini gemstone dice arrived a few days ago.
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Cool. I’ve had one of these since the 80’s but never knew it had a name!
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positive - negative = neutral.
that is, (positive) I started toying with the idea of merging the rubik’s cube with the magic squares into a number braille cube puzzle then (negative) discovered thru WP the mess of lack of standardisation (read: babel) of national Braille codes and (neutral) shelved the idea.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Lovely atmosphere with the autumn leaves today!
Glad everyone is safe.
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This month is Mental Health Month and I’m fundraising for it. I’ve already hit one third of my goal, which is great but predictable – I have generous friends.
After a few weeks of being tetchy or sludgy, I took today off as a mental health day. It went well! I got my newsletter written, played a little bit of video games, ticked off some nagging chores, but otherwise did some exercises in the warm Spring sunlight.
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I haven’t been around as much but really love catching up on everyone’s days!
I’m gonna list like three or four from the past couple of days:
Friday I played my first tabletop RPG! It was fun and somehow I timed it almost perfectly to leave when I got uncomfortable (they were all very nice, it’s something that honestly I don’t think could’ve been foreseen).
Saturday, I watched movies with my friends
Sunday, I watched a weekly show with my friends and another friend joined in and I don’t think I’ve laughed that hard and felt so comfortable in a minute
Yesterday, I watched a marathon with one of my friends about something foolish and we had a really good time.
Today, I have two whole posts on my neocities and I feel something starting to take shape, and I feel like I’m really going to enjoy learning what it decides to become (or keep becoming) and I’m gonna hang out with my girlfriend soon!
I’m glad you’re all safe and I hope you continue to be!
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Up early with a day off stretching ahead of me.
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Had my first PhD supervision of the new academic year and it went really well, feeling much more confident about the coming semester than I was before.
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Negative: we had to have our cat Blue euthanized today.
Positive: he’s no longer in pain from his bone cancer.
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